You are currently browsing posts tagged with Vanessa Hudgens

Last week, I caught up with the goings-on of NY fashion week almost entirely through the musings of our pals The Fug Girls for NY Mag, who thankfully survived a 20-minute fashionista pileup at the Erin Fetherston show, multiple uses of those hideous Port-a-Johns in Lincoln Center, and about a zillion (which is probably a zillion too many) sightings of the newly-single Vanessa Hudgens:

Is this leather? Or pleather? Whateather; I hate it!

But aside from The Fug Girls’ fun anecdotes, stories about this annual fashion clusterfuck tend to just annoy and/or confuse me. Maybe I’m grouchy because I need a new bag. And some new booties. And a new brown pleather minidress. And I’m suffering from a raging case of lady hormones. And I’m freezing my arse off (LA’s in the 50s right now–but it feels like 37 degrees in my house), so looking at a bunch of skinny people with bare legs instead of winter coats in February in cold-ass New York just makes me feel COLDER.

Now London is celebrating its own Fashion Week, and I can’t seem to deal with it either. My fingers are freezing just as I type the word “fashion.” Is that why I can’t look at these pictures of you outside the Burberry show, Gemma Chang? Whoever you are? Who are you?

Enter Lemonade Mouth, brought to you by Disney Channel Original Movies–producers of HSM–the plot of which sounds something like The Breakfast Club meets School of Rock for the Belieber set. In other words, it will be awful! And, in other words, I will be watching it late at night on my DVR when I can’t sleep and am particularly vulnerable to bad TV starring teens with impossibly good skin who will make me feel only more wretched and old than I already do!

I will also be watching Lemonade Mouth for Hayley Kiyoko (pictured, center), who plays one of the lead misfits. Because the 19 year-old of Japanese descent is crazy talented. She plays the drums, keys, guitar, and writes her own music. I’m particularly partial to the song “Lungs” on her MySpace (listen here). She’s also in a girl group called The Stunners who opened for the Biebs last summer, not that you care (I mean, I don’t). And she’s so pretty in a tomboyish way-Hayley played Velma in both Cartoon Network Scooby Doo movies–she kind of demands your attention. Added bonus: she’s goofy as hell, as witnessed by this YouTube video she made last summer, when she and girl-groupmate Lauren Hudson, who’s also Asian, got stuck in the back of their tour van:

Okay, okay. As you know, I normally wouldn’t encourage dudes to pretend-jerk off under their bed sheets on camera. Or make lewd tongue gestures as if they’re lasciviously lapping up a beef curtain hoagie. Or fondle themselves while declaring “Tittays!”

This is a perfect example of how sometimes life is not made up of absolutes.

For some reason, because YouTuber Jr. DaPhamily is just a teeny young pup, with cheeks like the great plains, he can do whatever the sam hell he pleases on camera and it’s a-okay by me.

I mean, check out this kid, who got as worked up as I did to see Vanessa Hudgens in the buff…again.

Perhaps it’s because we’re all a just a human bag of hormones at that tender age, shuffling off into corners to masturbate while imagining, hopefully, what real kissing is like. And after all, let’s assume he doesn’t necessarily know what he’s doing with his tongue (lewd gestures and “Tittays” both included) from experience–rather from a big brother or a couple of snakey pals. Big whoop.

All I know is that for some reason, this little perv rocks my socks off (*If you’re reading this, kid: I said “my socks,” not “my panties”), and I simply cannot stop laughing throughout each one of his short, emphatic videos.

Important caveat to this, however. Seriously, in a year or so–or the minute those cheeks flatten out by even a millimeter–when DaPhamily is old enough to know better and interfacing with real human girls–this form of behavior will actually be REALLY UNACCEPTABLE. (Ya hear that, kid? Better learn to respeck!)

Back in late 2007, there was a lot of speculation about when the first set of leaked nude photos of tween icon Vanessa Hudgens were actually shot. Frankly, I believed her story: they were 3-year old snaps from roughly 2003, taken and once sent to her high school boyfriend (shockingly, if you did the math, this made her out to be about 14 or 15 in the shots). The ex was a bit of a bastard, and eventually got his jollies by disseminating the sexy pictures across the interwebz. Because she was so young, I felt reallyreallyreally almost-pedophil-icky just glancing at the images (the link above is to censored versions)–after all, Hudgens was essentially a child in them. A nude child, a famous nude child lacking judgment, and indeed a ripening sexual being, but a child nonetheless.

So I basically gave her a pass. No, it wasn’t a good idea to take those pictures of herself, but for chrissake, don’t we all do a bunch of stupid things when we’re kids? How smart can you actually be at 14 when half your brain is jelly and the other hormones? There’s no such thing as foresight at that time. Instead, I felt the blame was on us, grown-up people with nothing better to do than avoid our jobs by scouring gossip blogs and leer over dirty pictures of Disney stars. Pathetic. Icky. Shameful.

People in Hudgens’s camp apparently claim that these photos are as old or even older than the originals, but I’m not so sure. As you can probably see, her body shape has toned and matured significantly. The cheeks once adorably swollen with baby fat–quite evident in the original photos, seem oh-so-sinewy and adult in the latest. The glossy blowouts of her glamorous locks are consistent with her look of the last couple of years. And the black RAZR phone that she captures in this number:

Like, forever ago

…wasn’t released to special folks, like Hollywood stars, until mid-to-late 2005, and really saw its heyday from 2006 to 2007.

Then there’s that belly-button ring, which she apparently got in 2007, prominent in so many of the pictures. Hunh.

I’m not saying that these photos are from last week. But I am saying that I’m not buying this jazz about how Hudgens made one mistake six years ago, and it was one she never repeated.

Why does this bother me so much? Maybe because I’m convinced these pictures really have been living on Hudgen’s SIM card for a while. And for the life of me, I cannot understand why.

I absolutely, positively need to know why the MySpace generation, even its celebrity icons, are so desperate to document their goody-goods in easily sharable formats.

It’s not like these people don’t understand that we live in the shadow of Big Brother. He will find you, with his lipstick security camera or Flip cam or cameraphone, pissing yourself at a party or screwing somebody else’s boyfriend, whether you’re famous or not. Yes, once upon a time, a picture was just a picture–and if you destroyed the print, the film, and any potential Xeroxes you were in pretty good shape. Today, if you so much as think about attending a party, there’s already a photo of you there tagged on Facebook; its file remnants, regardless of what you do, forever living somewhere entangled within their intellectual property policy.

We as a people are becoming too well-documented. Pictures are too easy to take. I have about 60 photos in an album from my entire childhood; I’ve got 40 new pictures on my Blackberry of myself next to a super weird dog I met at a coffee shop last week. Put to record far more often, young celebrities are immortalized in thousands of photographs every day–they even enjoy the benefits of Photoshop–why in fuck’s sake would they need more? And why do they always take pics that are reminiscent of amateur video porn?

It disappoints me. And it frightens the hell out of me (Note to my womb: no future baby ever to be built in there will be given a cameraphone for Christmas). It’s yet another reminder that the up-and-coming stars of today aren’t like those in Hollywood’s golden years–those people with so much talent and presence and spark and “a certain something” that they simply needed to be harnessed and put on film–they’re just a bunch of kids that need attention, just like everybody else.

In the end, I still feel pretty icky about looking at the racy Hudgens photos. But perhaps now for a different reason.

…which I think is just plain unfair. Why, you ask? Yes, Vanessa is Zac’s lady, and therefore mildly responsible for him looking relatively cleaned up when he walks out the door. You could almost argue that she should’ve busted his ass on that wax right out of the shower on premiere day.

Except: we ladies can help you fellas buy jeans that don’t look like they were obtained at a 1992 Gap. We can help you pick out shirts for work. We can give you cologne for Christmas, introduce you to Kiehl’s men’s products, request that you shower regularly, and quickly size you up before you walk out the door.

But we can’t be responsible for your waxy-ass ears. Boys, that was yo’ mama’s job. And if you’re old enough to screw/drink/smoke, now it’s yours.

This is a cease-and-desist letter, ordering you to stop pursing your lips like that immediately. I can’t tell whether you just sucked on something sour [insert Zac Efron penis joke here] or if you’re really really really pleased with yourself. Or if you went to Jessica Simpson’s lip doctor. Any which way, it’s not a good look for you. It’s creepy. It’s aging. It’s contagious:

Creepy, aging, contagious…what I’m getting at here is that it’s a face for ghouls. I should know, I invented it.

Oh Vanessa Hudgens, you pretty little tartlet, whatsamatter? Are you knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door with a virus, like me? Do you have a soft spot for those O.G. sweatpants with the elastic hems because you find that they truly can be cute and comfortable (except, I will argue, when they are seventeen sizes too big), like Jen? Did you have a Jamie-Lynn Spears scare this week? Did Zac Efron make out with your brother?

Tell me, girlfriend, cuz you’s lookin’ such a mess. I want to help you, mostly because I’m worried about all the shluz and bactaria your sweatpant folds are collecting from the ground (that’s the clean-freak dad in me talking), but also because I’d simply like to see you smiling again. Give me a call. I’ll have a pint of Ben & Jerry’s at your house in a hot minute.